Sunday, January 12, 2014

The War on Poverty is Our Moral Challenge Now

"Overcoming poverty is not a task of charity," said Nelson Mandela,
"it is an act of justice." When the War on Poverty began a half-century
ago, it was widely seen as the moral obligation of a wealthy nation.

President Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty in his first State
of the Union message, fifty years ago.

That speech was delivered on
January 8, 1964, to a Congress and a nation still grieving the
assassination of a young and vibrant President. "Let us carry forward
the plans and programs of John Fitzgerald Kennedy," said Johnson, "not
because of our sorrow or sympathy, but because they are right."

Johnson knew that some of his colleagues might pay a price for their
political courage on this issue. But he rejected the path of centrist
convenience in his moral call to fellow Democrats. Said Johnson: "I
especially ask all members of my own political faith, in this election
year, to put your country ahead of your party."

Some sacrifices are worth the price. But then, as now, politicians
and journalists often dealt with the moral challenge of poverty by
rendering it invisible. Michael Harrington talked about that in his 1962
book, "The Other America," writing of the "normal and obvious causes of the invisibility of the poor."

Those forces "operated a generation ago," wrote Harrington, and "they
will be functioning a generation hence... the very development of
American society is creating a new kind of blindness about poverty. The
poor are increasingly slipping out of the very experience and
consciousness of the nation."